the donkey punch

Americans freed from military-industrial complex, jobs:

In a shocking upset Friday, Boeing lost the long-awaited and lucrative Air Force refueling-tanker contract to a competing bid based on an Airbus plane.
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Boeing’s loss means the 767 assembly line in Everett will wind to a close around 2012 when the current commercial orders run out.  
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Large sections of the Northrop/EADS tanker will be built in Europe; they will be shipped across the Atlantic for assembly at a new widebody-jet plant to be built in Mobile, Ala., which will gain some 1,500 direct jobs.

Employing Europeans, shipping planes back and forth across the Atlantic, screwing 2,000 to 6,000 Washingtonians out of jobs. I love it.

Owned:

“If we were to prohibit sovereign wealth funds from investing in our market for fear they might introduce market distortions, there is a risk we might actually end up doing precisely this to ourselves,” said Ethiopis Tafara, director of the office of international affairs for the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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The credit crisis, which has left several financial firms strapped for cash, opened up even more opportunities for these funds. A number of Wall Street firms have looked to sovereign wealth funds to raise capital.

So far, Citigroup has raised $22 billion from state funds located in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Singapore. Others have enacted similar moves including Merrill Lynch, which has raised nearly $13 billion from the governments of Kuwait, Korea and Singapore’s state-run Temasek Holdings. In December, Morgan Stanley said it received a $5 billion injection from China’s state-run investment arm, China Investment Corp.